We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Victoria Cirigliano a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Victoria , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

It’s been my nickname since I was an early teenager. A dear friend of mine started calling me VICSON and I made it my messenger name, it turned out to be pretty catchy as everyone started calling me that, so it stucked and I always knew that the day I created my own brand, VICSON would be it’s name. (Thank you Sofi 😉)

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

VICSON started as an idea back in 2012 when I was 20 years old in Buenos Aires, Argentina (from where I am from) I was completing my degree in Public Relations and I couldn’t envision myself working on an office every day or for someone else. I gave it a shot working in my family’s company but it was soon clear that it wasn’t for me.

Since I can remember I always been extremely passionate about fashion, but as I grew older I started realizing that what amazed me more about fashion was the business side of it, so I went and did a few courses about Business of Fashion and Fashion Marketing in both London and Paris.

I never saw myself as a designer, but in this journey of finding my path, social media was just starting to become a big thing, and I saw an opportunity, I decided to start a shoe brand and sell it through Facebook (2012). So I started searching for factories, knocking doors, I would show up unannounced in hopes they will give me a shot. I had NO CLUE what I was doing, never knew before how to design a collection, or the development process, anything. I made so many mistakes along the way, but it got me where I am today so I wouldn’t trade it.

I did everything myself, for almost four years I didn’t have a single one employee or intern, I learned a lot about this business and that gave me the confidence to embark into this new adventure..

Fast Forward to today, VICSON has been a US based brand for 2 years now, we manufacture in Brazil, we are building an amazing community nationwide, we collaborate organically with tastemakers that we look up to and we have been published in publications such as Harpers Bazaar, Footwear News, The Zoe Report to name a few. And we are only getting started

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

When we decided to change our market and close shop in Argentina to launch the brand in the US, due to high risk limitations on exportation, dollar rates, etc manufacturing in Argentina was too risky at that time for us. So we had to search for factories in a different country knowing literally anybody. After deciding that the best option for VICSON was Brazil and after countless google searches I decided to contact Brazil’s shoe association, I shoot them an email with little expectations of getting a response and they were actually amazingly helpful. They contacted me with some factories, I scheduled meetings and the following week I was on my way to Brazil to meet with a dozen factories until I chose the amazing factory we still work with run by an incredible mother/daughter duo who converted the factory to be as sustainable as it can be including solar panels.
So the lesson from this I’d say is, find a way, not an excuse. And take chances.

How did you build your audience on social media?

When we change our market from Argentina to the US we had amass a great social media following which was great to embark into a new market as a new brand. But there was a catch…. All those amazing followers were from Argentina and we were not longer selling there, so a few months in we realized that the algorithm was of course only showing our content to people from Argentina. It was already too late to shut it down and create a new one because we already had built a small but loyal US based following but with the algorithm working against us it was really hard to grow. So we had to make the tough call of erasing most of our following so we could better reach our US audience.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://shopvicson.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/vicson?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoria-cirigliano-636214198

Image Credits
Michigan Rabbit